First responders at the site of an Israeli airstrike in the Bachoura area of central Beirut, Lebanon, March 18.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.
Israel has launched yet another invasion of Lebanon. But in doing so, it appears to be forgetting its own experiences in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006 and 2023-2024.
Spoiler alert: it never worked out well for Israel (or the Lebanese). And at times, these operations actually benefited the militia groups Israel was battling.
The echoes to the 1982 invasion, in particular, are striking and telling. Under a militaristic Likud government, Israel vowed to uproot the guerrilla fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization. After a brutal campaign, PLO forces and political leadership agreed to relocate to far-flung Tunisia.
Despite culminating in the appalling massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Shia refugees in Sabra and Shatila by an Israel-backed Christian militia group, the war initially appeared to be successful for Israel. Dubbed Peace for Galilee, it was supposed to produce sustained calm in northern Israel and along the Lebanese border.
Expanded Israeli evacuation order creating ghost towns in southern Lebanon
Instead, Israel’s prolonged occupation of southern Lebanon provided a golden opportunity for the young Islamic Republic of Iran to spread its “revolutionary” ideology among the Lebanese Shiites, the majority population in the south. Before 1982 was out, Hezbollah was founded, funded, trained and armed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, and it would serve as the template for all subsequent Iranian proxy groups elsewhere.
Israel had driven the PLO out of Lebanon, only to sign a series of de facto peace agreements with it just a decade later in 1993. But Hezbollah proved to be a more capable, tenacious and dangerous opponent than the PLO ever was.
In part because of the new danger that this Iranian proxy group posed, Israel maintained its occupation of the south of Lebanon. Eventually, they were driven out in May, 2000, after a sustained insurgency by Hezbollah. As with all effective guerrilla campaigns, Hezbollah won by making the costs of the occupation too high for Israel to bear.
But Hezbollah persisted in combatting Israel, on the grounds that a number of small villages remained under occupation. It even used this flimsy rationalization to refuse to disarm like all other Lebanese militias did under the 1989 agreement that ended the country’s civil war.
Mass funeral reinforces Lebanese belief that the Israel-Hezbollah war primarily hurts civilians
Israel’s occupation of the south provided the indispensable context for the founding and rise of Hezbollah. And by holding onto small pieces of Lebanese territory, Israel provided the group with a way to justify its private army and its undue authority over matters like war and peace to other Lebanese.
Things have changed since. After Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Hezbollah sought a contained and limited conflict with Israel to maintain its revolutionary credentials. But Israel, seeking instead to inflict a heavy strategic blow on Iran and its Hezbollah-led network in the Arab world, consistently escalated its pressure on the group until finally unleashing a massive attack, initiated by the explosion of thousands of booby-trapped pagers in September, 2024. Within less than a month, the organization’s arsenal of missiles was severely degraded, its paramilitary commanders were decimated, and its senior political leadership wiped out. And this month, Lebanon’s government declared Hezbollah’s military actions illegal, prompted by a virtually nationwide consensus of anger at the group outside of its core members and supporters.
Signs of misery, bravery and civic duty as Beirut is overwhelmed by displaced Lebanese
If Israel plays its cards right, Hezbollah should be meaningfully marginalized, and it’s unlikely that a new insurgent group would emerge and prove again to be more dangerous than its predecessor. But the Israeli government wants to wipe Hezbollah out once and for all, much like they did with the PLO in 1982 – even though this war, which is likely to be waged on a large scale over a prolonged time and involve a new occupation, is just as liable to result in unintended consequences as previous invasions.
If Israel re-establishes a large, open-ended occupation in southern Lebanon, it is likely that Hezbollah will, over time, thrive again. After all, fighting Israeli invasions and occupations is the only thing they are good at. Paradoxically, Israel could wind up saving Hezbollah from themselves and their recent spectacular blunders.
In Lebanon, Israel appears to be using tactics of mass displacement and massive destruction to try to eliminate the environment in which its adversaries operate, as it has done in Gaza. But there, Hamas has not been destroyed, despite its heavy losses. In fact, it is back in power in many of the areas into which Palestinians in Gaza have been driven.
Wars of vengeance rarely produce strategically and politically advantageous outcomes. Israel’s past experiences in Lebanon demonstrate that irrefutably – and now, it is opening itself up to the possibility that history could yet again repeat itself.